Your Sixteenth Birthday

Submitted to 'You Must Be This Tall to Ride' on 10/08/09

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Your Sixteenth Birthday

It is your sixteenth birthday. You are almost a man. But not quite. Although you've already experienced sex, you still collect baseball cards. Even though there is a new lime-covered Chevy Chevette in your driveway -- a gift from your mother and father -- you still prefer the go-carts that you and your friends have painstakingly put together using scavenged Big Wheel tires and plywood and thick rope. Although you have a real job working after school and weekends at a fish market, you sometimes on Saturdays arrive late, delayed by the awesome lineup of new cartoons.

Before the guests arrive, your mother asks you to sit at the dining table for a photograph. Of course, you don't refuse because pictures are something big with Filipinos. A kind of tradition. Your entire life has been documented with photographs. In those images your mother treasures there is a white kid who stands out from the Asian family. That is you.

Your cousin Tony, who'd come up from San Francisco to spend the weekend with you, stands posing behind you, to your right. Although you can't possibly know it yet, in the years to come he will lose his slow, lingering battle with cancer. Your sister, Shirley, stands to your left. She will marry three times before settling down.

Your mother says, 'Say cheese.' And in the blinding flash, you intuit the onset of change.

But it is not until later, during the hours that follow the photographing of you and your cousin and sister that an event will take place in your own backyard. An event in which you will be tilted into adulthood.

The guests, many of whom you don't know, begin to pile into the house and yard. Among so many Filipinos, you feel alone; out of place; undesired. But this is not an unfamiliar feeling. It's a feeling that has been present your entire life. And this is not a feeling that surfaces only when you are among Filipinos. It also occurs, more frequently even, when your white friends find out that your family is not white.

That event that changes you is not the moment when standing outdoors by yourself the lapels of your coat are grabbed and you are thrown suddenly against the wall of your own home by someone you don't even know. No, that's not it.

Nor is it when the stranger begins slurring, his face in your face, how much he hates white people. And how you made a huge mistake showing up at this party, one in which, if you had bothered to look around, was meant for Filipinos.

It isn't when the stranger releases a groan from his mouth and his grip on your coat, either. He drops to the grass in front of you, and is rolled onto his back and straddled by one of your cousins.

And it isn't when that same cousin reaches for a bulge in his coat and removes a pistol and presses the barrel hard against the stranger's forehead.

Not when your cousin thumbs back the hammer, either.

Nor is it when through a dizzying blur of screams and excited voices the stranger begins to sob, begging your cousin not to squeeze the trigger. No, that's not it.

The moment that tilts you into adulthood is the instant your cousin turns to ask you with his eyes if he should pull the trigger. That's the moment when you are no longer a boy.

The backyard has grown quiet and you can't stop yourself from sweating and trembling. A simple nod of your head and so many lives would be changed.

The choice belongs to you and nobody else. The choice will mold you in the eyes of all those who are quietly waiting; nervously watching.

But that choice is whisked away the instant your sister's boyfriend pushes through the crowd and makes the decision for you. The stranger is helped to his feet and led out of the back yard with his friends to his car.

Of course your shoulders are popped by friends and relatives, your back is slapped, and you are asked if you're all right. Then, while you once again retreat to the shadows of your own back yard, the party continues, late into the night, as if nothing has happened.

When everyone leaves and you are alone in your bedroom, you replay that moment in your mind. You weren't strong enough, confident enough, or adult enough to make a decision.

And when you think of the choice you might have made if your sister's boyfriend hadn't stepped in, you begin to cry.

Nothing you try and do makes the tears stop flowing. You don't have a real clue as to why you are crying. The only thing you are sure of is that little of your life makes sense.

Little of your life has ever made sense. How, you wonder, does a boy who is by all appearances white, become a part of something foreign.

After groping in the dark for the nightstand lamp, you sit on the edge of your bed, damp with sweat.

Across the room, on top of your desk, sits a stack of baseball cards. You push off the bed, walk over, pull the stool out from under the desk and, for a long time you sit studying the photographs of the players on your baseball cards. You read the histories and statistics and cartoons on the backsides. You bring the cardboard pictures close to your nostrils and breathe in the sugary scent of bubble gum.

But not even this once endearing pleasure can erase the hazed images of the stranger's frightened face from your mind.

When the sun starts coming into your room through the edges of the curtain, you gather all of your cherished baseball cards and stuff them into a tattered shoebox.

Then you look at yourself in the mirror and say, "I am white. I am not white. I am me."

At first I laugh at the absurdity of the situation, then I realize that I am suddenly empowered with identity. I am me. I am me. I am me.

After replacing the lid on the shoe box, I shove it under my bed where it remains, like the insecurities I'd harbored prior to that night -- forgotten until now.